WHAT THE STARS KEPT

Rae Thorne has a star.

Not in the way people buy them — she isn't that kind of person — but in the way that matters. The kind that finds you in the dark when everything else has fallen apart. The kind that has watched over her for forty years through grief and motherhood and a life that always felt like it was missing something she couldn't name.

Then it shatters.

One moment she is on her porch with a glass of rosé and an existential crisis. The next she is standing in a forest that is too vivid and too alive, wearing a one-sleeved shirt that belongs to a man who smells like sunshine, surrounded by warriors who insist they need her help to save their dying realm.

Rae is forty, soft in all the places life has touched her, and absolutely nobody's chosen one. She has two boys at home who need their lunchboxes packed and a mortgage that doesn't care about magical realms. She is not a warrior. She is not a hero.

But something in Aisling recognises her anyway.

And Aldric — golden, infuriating, hauntingly familiar Aldric — looks at her like she is both the answer to a question he has carried for centuries and the one thing he cannot afford to want.

The Static is spreading. The realm is fracturing. And the path through the fire leads somewhere Rae is not sure she is ready to go.

But then, she never did know how to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.